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Romney and Obama: Like two peas in a pod

By Heidi Crimmin

Posted:
11/04/2012 01:00:00 AM MST

In case anyone has any lingering illusions that the two major presidential candidates offer voters a genuine choice on Nov. 6, let's review the many ways in which Obama and Romney are indistinguishable.

On the economic front, both candidates have expressed support for stimulus programs, taxpayer-funded bailouts for select companies, TARP, and potentially a new Value Added Tax. They both talk as if it is the president's job to manage the economy and create jobs. (In reality, the knowledge necessary to manage our highly complex $15 trillion economy is dispersed in the minds of all 315 million Americans, and it doesn't need central management any more than we need central management of pencils, paper, cars, computers, or anything else.) Neither candidate has a credible plan for reforming the budget-busting entitlements, reigning in the gargantuan debt, or for averting the fiscal cliff just up ahead.

On the foreign policy front, both Romney and Obama support U.S. intervention in Syria and elsewhere, and neither of them has expressed opposition to pre-emptive wars without congressional approval. Both support the crushing economic sanctions against Iran, apparently heedless of Bastiat's warning: "When goods and services don't cross borders, armies will."

Neither candidate questions the need to spend roughly a trillion dollars a year (of borrowed money) on "defense" (militarism) in spite of the fact that the United States is blessed with vast oceans to the east and west and peaceful neighbors to the north and south, and we already spend more on "defense" than much of the rest of the world combined. (The Swiss have been minding their own business for centuries, and nobody terrorizes them.)

Both Romney and Obama approve of Ben Bernanke as Fed chairman, and neither questions the legitimacy of our central bank (for which there is no authority in our Constitution, although it is Plank No. 5 of the Communist Manifesto). Neither candidate questions the Fed's ability to create money out of thin air and backed by nothing. Neither questions the morality of our inflationary monetary system that steadily and stealthily robs us of our savings and purchasing power through the insidious inflation tax.

Since "RomneyCare" was a model for "ObamaCare," we know that both candidates favor more political control over health care rather than market-based reforms, and since Goldman Sachs is a major contributor to both campaigns, we can guess who will remain in charge of our Treasury Department.

It is remarkable that neither candidate dares to mention our nation's 40-year-long failed attempt at drug prohibition, which has been no more successful than the attempt at alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. Let's recap what the War on Drugs has accomplished since it was declared by Nixon in 1971: While it hasn't made a dent in the availability or use of recreational drugs, it has eroded civil liberties, destroyed financial privacy, jeopardized private property rights (through asset forfeiture laws), corrupted our criminal justice system, militarized the police, wasted hundred of billions of tax dollars, ruined countless lives, enriched the drug cartels, and greatly enriched the prison-industrial complex. In other words, it's been a typical liberty-destroying racket run for the benefit of politically well-connected insiders. Since neither Romney nor Obama has anything to say about this atrocity, we can assume that their administrations will continue with business as usual in the drug war (and I'll assume that everyone who supports them with votes or money is thereby complicit).

Throughout my entire life, the two major presidential candidates have portrayed themselves as being at opposite ends of the political spectrum, yet they are both statists, corporatists, redistributionists, foreign interventionists, authoritarians, Keynesians, central planners, drug warriors, defenders of the status quo, and front men for the power elite and assorted special interests.

This charade that we go through every four years was exposed by Carroll Quigley nearly half a century ago when he wrote in "Tragedy and Hope:" "The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy."

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